Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
At present, in the United States there is no obligation for farmers
and growers to organize postmarket environmental monitoring. Limited
attention is paid to the exact conditions under which such plants are cul-
tivated, stored, exported, and handled. From the beginning a deliberate
choice was made to treat them as any other food product (see Chapter
2). In addition, the various incidents that have been reported, concerning
dissemination, cross-pollination, or commingling errors between storage
facilities, have not been directly life threatening for human beings. For
many experts, these events are not classified as “safety-related” problems
but more as “quality-related” issues.
Nonetheless, these events received a lot of public scrutiny, especially
because they exposed to the world the hidden face of the whole pro-
cess: that is, the daily operations at the production sites. Human and
organizational factors are suddenly in the loop, seeking a place at the
table. As Armin Sp ok warns us in his eye-opening chapter (Chapter 7),
these human and organizational issues will not be ignored for long, as
they constitute challenges for further development of plant-made phar-
maceuticals. These crops should not occur accidentally in the food and
feed chain because unlike first-generation GM crops, plant-made phar-
maceuticals are purposely designed to have a biological effect on man or
animal health and well-being.
This neglect for environmental issues is less true in EU recommen-
dations and philosophy, although interest in the subject is somewhat
moderate. An excerpt of the “Opinion of the Scientific Panel on Genet-
ically Modified Organisms on the Post Market Environmental Monitor-
ing (PMEM), adopted on January 25, 2006,” will illustrate our point.
Indeed, when read carefully, ambiguity emerges. If the first sentence is
quite clear “A plan for Post Market Environmental Monitoring (PMEM)
of genetically modified (GM) plants is
mandatory
5
in all applications for
deliberate release submitted under EU directive 2001/18/EC and EU
regulation 1829/2003,” the further developments in the opinion weaken
5
Italics added.
